


Burnt Offering

by highfantastical



Category: Richard II - Shakespeare
Genre: Burnt Palaces, Historical, Multi, Nasty Medieval Diseases, Shipboard Sex, The King's Two Bodies, The Lords Appellant, The Peasants' Revolt, Touching Dead People
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-19
Updated: 2009-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-04 15:31:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/31771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/highfantastical/pseuds/highfantastical
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>February 1413, July 1399: Henry and Aumerle. And, of course, Richard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burnt Offering

**Author's Note:**

> Written for faithhopetricks in the 2009 Histories Ficathon.

His glittering arms he will commend to rust,   
His barbed steeds to stables, and his heart   
To faithful service of your majesty. 

~_Richard II_, Act III, scene iii

_1\. _

Composing himself and wooing sleep, King Henry will fold his hands on his breast, sometimes, as though in prayer. The discipline of this familiar position hinders him from touching his skin's sores. Several times the physician has timidly reproved him.

 

It is likely, he knows already – and who, at night, can forget such things – to be an ugly and an English death. The vows he made at Windsor will join the other broken vows; expiation, too, has gone awry. When he thinks of the Holy Land, he sees wreckage. He remembers gazing out at the grey streaming Thames, and behind him, the cicatrice striping the land. The palace was a ruin; so were they all. It looked, he thought, as if the wrath of God had been there. He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. Richard's sorrow was spoken of, not only by his own courtiers but in distant manors; Richard was prodigal of it. It seemed bad form to mourn aloud for anyone but her: the other deaths were quiet.

 

Even now, Anne will thread herself through Henry's griefs. Mary's memory is bound up with fear for his son and for the realm that will be his son's care; Anne comes to him in lucid flashes. It is February, and the wind cries beyond his walls: he remembers the icy and bright day when she knelt at Gloucester's feet with her strained face upturned. He cannot remember what she said; only her dignity when she knew that they would never stop refusing her. Later he went to see them, and it was for her, not for Richard – the chamber where they sat was sweet with forced roses, they sat side-by-side and hand-in-hand. Richard's smile held the smugness of a child who still has his milk teeth but wears a crown. That look was strange on an adult face, and very strange _then_: just a few weeks after the confrontation that had ended with tears, with Henry and Thomas Mowbray staying the night in the Tower because the king, God save him, was distraught. Richard imagined, Henry thinks, that it was his Thermopylae, and perhaps he was not wholly wrong. Henry could not have said then, or not with any truth, what victory meant.

 

Most nights he remembers cool eyelids that, when left alone, he kissed. There was a blankness in his mind, and it reproduces itself in little when he pictures Richard, so that he sees, but cannot truly think.

 

The lips, cracked. The hands damaged as though, sometime before death, he had dug his own nails into the skin. He did not look contrite. That insubstantial head, like a carving in stone, an early martyr: and how Richard would like that. When he peeled back the dusty covering, there was skin covered with soft down, a strangely animal covering for such entirely human bones. The saddest thing was that unrelieved silence. He could not stop expecting some verbal escamotage. Even now he wonders, appalled, if there was a quickening under his touch. It has been said that there is no rest for the wicked.

 

He remembers a glimpse – through a tall crowd in bright array, and nearly all of them now dead – of a shoe slipping, disregarded, from a small, silk-clad foot. Henry is like the man who went and sold all that he had, in exchange for the greatest of good things. The crown seems to mean too much, and at the same time nothing. On the day that Richard rode out to Smithfield, there were prayers at dawn. Henry remembers kneeling, the prayers running quietly over him, the air was weighty with moisture and he could not stop glancing up at Richard, who had risen and walked to the window. One moment he would be looking out, and then he would turn his gaze back to the people in the room. The hair was standing out around his face like a halo, glittering with dew. Henry has never seen a face – not even his grandfather's – looking so conscious of majesty.

 

_Richard is slightly flushed; he has prayed for their preservation, but he is not praying now. _

 

It is some days since Henry last saw his son. His son, almost a whore – the keen little pain of thinking so, and he never shirks it – reminds him far too much.

 

Later, his son begins to rebuild Shene.

***

_2\. _

 

For a while, Aumerle watches him roam hither and thither across the swaying deck. The grey waves throwing themselves about are a deceit, Aumerle thinks, they seem changeless and identical, but England is getting nearer. He half-wonders if there is no such thing, for him anyway, as an unhappy return. When Richard pauses beside him, he says, There is a joy in treading one's native earth. Richard says in a cold voice, I never left my kingdom. He turns away, he goes below. Aumerle glances at Carlisle, and Carlisle looks back, imperturbable. England is holding herself ready like a dais, and they all know it.

 

Aumerle follows, of course, because without Richard the deck feels empty. The pitching seas seem far worse below-decks, and Richard – seated in a tall chair, hands briefly quiet in his lap – is pale with nausea. I'm very sorry, Aumerle says. Before he can say anything else, Richard beckons him forward and he comes. They have left war behind them, and war is awaiting them, but this is the space between, and he knows what to do. His hands weaken with each buckle and each tie that he unfastens, these delicate layers of concealment seem heavy, because his hands know that beneath them, at the last, there is the king and nothing else. He feels altogether bemused, and when Richard's chest is bare – the purest white in that moving lamplight – he leans his head against it for a moment or two, then kisses the hard hollow sternum, once for each creak of the wood around them, and the ship is like a shell of safety for them alone. They are at its veriest heart. It is not possible, Aumerle knows it deep within himself, that Richard could be drowned.

 

Aumerle lifts a tired hand and trails a finger along Richard's arm, all the way to the soft wrist-skin. After a minute Richard pushes him gently away, stands up, frees himself from the last clothes, and sheds affliction like a skin. His thighs and arms and throat exact worship, as well as love. Aumerle, kissing his way down, spasmodically remembers – when he can think of anything but Richard's hands on his hair and his shoulders – his own venomous and tender parting from Henry. You'd better forget all about me, Henry said, and closed his mouth up tight. Aumerle remembers pressing his lips to the cold cheek for an instant, and Henry said, Farewell, and turned quickly away.

 

Richard murmurs into his hair, then: Aumerle, as though he wasn't quite sure who was there. Richard thinks of Anne kneeling. Of a crimson book ornamented with silver roses. He whispers, This is my beloved, and this is my friend.

 

***

 

_3\.   
_

Rutland can do nothing at all now, unless he yield up his own life quite fruitlessly, so he takes to his knees. He asks for pity to be shown to the captive. He suspects that the captive is not maintaining a similar degree of concentration in his own prayers.

 

_For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering._


End file.
